Two months later, Hubert Davis remembers exactly how long it took for the bus ride that changed North Carolina's season.
"It was an hour and ten minutes," he said this week of the ride home from Winston-Salem after a 98-76 defeat at Wake Forest. "But it was a long hour and ten minutes. I had a lot of things going through my head."
The Tar Heels had gone into the week with high hopes, with the chance to play at Miami for a share of first place in the Atlantic Coast Conference. But the game in Coral Gables was a Hurricane rout, and the margin at Wake wasn't much better.
Combine those game results with some personnel shuffles—the Tar Heels had already lost Anthony Harris for the season and were about to lose Dawson Garcia—and there have been cases of lesser adversity sinking a first-year head coach.
But the next day at practice, Davis did something entirely unexpected. His team had already seen his angry side after blowout losses to Tennessee and Kentucky. The practices following those games were physical and intense. The Tar Heels likely thought they were about to get more of the same.
"I saw their faces when I came in the room," Davis said of that Sunday practice. "They thought I was going to be upset with them. So I told them to get their chairs and come closer to me."
What Davis said next was very simple and seemed to change the course of the season:
"I'm proud of you. We didn't play well last week, but that was one week. We're going to be a good basketball team. We will get back to the kind of basketball we're capable of this week, and we'll be right back in position for all the things we want to achieve."
Even two months later, Davis gets a small smile on his face when he thinks about that meeting. "For whatever reason, it loosened them up," he says. "And it made them feel like things were going to be OK."
Those 24 hours following the loss to Wake—no one would have believed on that night that the Demon Deacons were headed for the NIT and Carolina would be in the NCAA Tournament—were also instrumental for another reason: it was the first step in the players taking some ownership of the season.
Some postgame struggles with the food delivery and arena requirements on where the postgame meal could be eaten delayed the Tar Heels leaving the venue, meaning they arrived back at the Smith Center even later than normal. But when they did, the night wasn't over.
That's when Armando Bacot and Brady Manek convened a meeting for the players.
"We sat in the locker room for an hour talking," Bacot says. "Brady gave us a few stories about how at Oklahoma they started with some losses and turned things around. That's when we drew the line as a team. That's when we discovered that in order for us to win, we had to play for each other and play as a team."
It's not just anecdotal. Prior to that night, the Tar Heels were averaging on assist on slightly over 50 percent of the team's baskets. Since that night, they're notching an assist on 56 percent of the squad's made field goals. Just as Bacot said, they are very literally playing more as a team.
Soon, Carolina was piling up the victories. On that night in Winston-Salem, the Heels were just 4-3 in the ACC. The leadership from the head coach and some newfound accountability from the players changed the season, and they won 12 of the next 15 games. Armando Bacot had the best season of his career and earned first team All-ACC honors. Leaky Black is a member of the ACC's All-Defensive team. Brady Manek is a Chapel Hill folk hero.
"That's why I coach," Davis says. "I want the players to experience the things that were given to me when I was here. And in a lot of ways, this has been a year of firsts. They're first time playing in front of big crowds, first real time being a Carolina basketball player, first time going to a real NCAA Tournament. It's been refreshing to see how excited they are about everything, because they haven't seen most of this before."
It all led up to an unforgettable night in Durham on the last Saturday of the regular season, exactly six weeks after that 70-minute trip home from Wake Forest. This time, the bus was jubilant instead of silent. And once again, after beating the Blue Devils, Hubert Davis knew exactly what his team needed. He directed the bus to leave Cameron Indoor Stadium and head directly to Franklin Street, where hordes of Tar Heel fans were still celebrating.
"The last couple years have been hard," Davis said. "I wanted them to have that experience that I had. We were taking the bus down there no matter what. As a matter of fact, I told them they could stay down there and I would take their bags to the locker room and make sure everything was clean. You can't just dream those types of things. You have to actually experience them so you can grab on to them and continue to want those types of things. I told our bus driver if he wanted to stay on Franklin Street, I would drive the bus back myself.
"All of those guys earned that experience. And I wanted that night to last forever for them."
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